Margaret Oliver

G330 – Graphic Illustration

Final Project:Creating a Book Cover

Initial Process:I collected images off the Internet regarding bats, night scenes, cityscapes, gothic clothing, the moon, bats,

and roads after determining that I wanted to create a hypothetical book cover for a made up author about

the subject of vampires. The novel is “The Vampire Rift” and the author is “Gwen Difference” while the

marketing tagline reads “A delicious tale of horror”. My target market is aged 18 – 25, fans of vampire sto-

ries, comics, and mysteries, literate, not necessarily academic, in tune with pop culture, has leisure time

to read, and female.

After coming up with this concept I proceeded to design some rough sketches and with the help of

classmates and our instructor’s feedback I created three developed roughs. After picking the best of the

lot I developed a rough design in Adobe Illustrator with elements created in Adobe Photoshop which

were imported to Illustrator as layer elements. I enjoyed drawing with a Wacom stylus and mouse with

this project and it was the first time I ever did that.

Concepts and Sketches:

Concepts and Typography:

I know that having tools is just a means to make something great happen. The ultimate responsibility

for that rests on my innate talents and depth of understanding of composition and design principles,

and my ability to correctly target a market for a client. To that end, with this project, I feel I have suc-

ceeded. I know that part of what makes a design truly unique is the use of custom letterforms. That is

why I created my own hand-lettered title, slogan, and author information in this book cover design. I

wanted something that wasn’t already out there, and something that went along with a dark yet playful

mood, while still being legible and relatively readable as well. Definitely, this is hand-formed display

text rather than body text.

From Start to Finish: 1 2 3

Additionally, using photographic references as a jumping off point for design is excellent, yet from the

beginning I didn’t seek realism for the design of my book cover. Rather, I chose to make something

influenced by the German Expressionist art movement while using my own style of heavy line and use of

contrast. The “sketch-like” look to this piece was what I was after, and the use of gradients really bumped

up the depth of field to this piece. I enjoyed using one point perspective and a mix of scale (look at the

relationship between the moon, the figure, the cast shadow, and the buildings).

Color is extremely important in conveying mood. This is a vampire story, a creepy tale, a mystery, yet at the

same time playfully welcoming. To capture my target audience effectively I wanted to appeal to women more

than men, and employed not only dark and macabre values in this work, but the hue of red as well. I chose

to use the tints and tones of a pink and burgundy to contrast sweetly with gray, white, and black. While pink

is also apparently a trending color as well, I feel I could not go wrong using it. There are several reasons for

using red, white, and black, none the least of which is the fact that red traditionally connotes blood. I think

the parasignals match the main message here.

Project Outcome & Reflections: I have grown a lot as an illustrator and designer while working on this project and my understanding of

how Adobe Illustrator works in relationship with other Adobe CS programs is vastly improved. Being able

to work quickly and intelligently came with learning the tools in this course such as the blob brush, eraser

tool, picking Fx for layers, grouping layers, thinking through layout for export, and adding and deleting

quickly pieces of overlapping elements through the use of the Shape Builder Tool, and indeed, even using

such awesome 3D effects as the perspective grid, mesh, and 3D Transform features of the program. I am

not one to confuse the power of these awesome tools with the fact of being a good designer or a creative

person. I konw that good tools make good designers even better at what they do.

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